New material: Five new books from late author JD Salinger are to be released, it has been announced

Five new books by the American author JD Salinger - who died in 2010 - are to be published in the coming years.

The reclusive writer, best known for the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, published nothing for 45 years before his death at the age of 91.

But the makers of a new documentary on the novelist have revealed the titles of five books to be published between 2015 and 2020.

The exhaustive documentary Salinger, which took Los Angeles script-writer Shane Salerno a decade and $2 million of his own money to make, was screened for the first time at the Telluride film festival in Colorado on Monday night.

Mr Salerno said that Salinger left instructions for his estate to publish after his death several works that he wrote over a number of decades in his isolated home in New Hampshire.

Fans of his most famous work will be pleased to hear that the main protagonist, Holden Caulfield, will be rolled out in a short story sequel titled ‘The Last and Best of the Peter Pans’, more than half a century after Salinger wrote it in 1962.

According to the documentary, the four other titles to be published between 2015 and 2020 are:

‘A Counterintelligence Agent’s Diary’ about his time interrogating prisoners of war when he served working in the counter-intelligence division; A World War II Love Story based on his brief marriage to Sylvia, a Nazi collaborator, just after the war; A Religious Manual detailing his adherence to Ramakrishna’s Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, the religion he turned to later in life; and ‘The Complete Chronicle of the Glass Family’ featuring five new short stories about his recurring character, Seymour Glass.

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In keeping with the author’s obsessive desire for secrecy, Salinger’s family and publishers have not made any public statement on the contents of the documentary, an accompanying 700-page book and a forthcoming film.

The Catcher in the Rye is noted as a classic depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence.

Its simple first person narrative details sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield’s experiences in New York following his expulsion from an elite prep school.

Famous: Salinger's most well-known work is undoubtedly The Catcher in the Rye

Although it received mixed reviews on publication, its acclaim and fame grew in later years and it has become a standard text in many secondary school English Literature classes.

Salinger followed the book with several short stories and novellas in the 1950s and 60s, but he then struggled with unwanted attention and disappeared from the literary landscape.

The new documentary and its accompanying book reveals the roles that post-traumatic stress and romantic liaisons played in Salinger’s work as he wrote several chapters of The Catcher in the Rye while serving with US forces in World War Two.

The documentary maker Mr Salerno believes that Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) played a large part in the author’s life, as he went through three marriages after the war.

He said: ‘World War II really was the transformative trauma of JD Salinger’s life. It made him as an artist, but it broke him as a man. He was living with PTSD throughout his life.

‘It really is the ghost in the machine of all his stories. When you re-read the work with that in mind, you even realize that The Catcher in the Rye is a disguised war novel.’